Only 7% of the words United States presidential hopeful Donald Trump used in the last Republican Party debate were longer than three syllables, AFP reported on Thursday. In fact, his addresses were simple enough for a nine-year-old to understand, according to the Flesch-Kincaid test developed by the US navy, which assesses the complexity of an English text by counting syllables and sentence lengths. Trump’s opening and closing speeches at the debate on December 15 were used for the analysis.
The report showed that Trump’s levels of English were the most basic of all nine Republican candidates, who were averaging at vocabulary meant for 11- to 15-year-olds. Trump stuck to short and simple words like “good”, “bad” and “stupid”.
"If I'm elected president, we will win again. We will win a lot. And we're going to have a great, great country, greater than ever before," Trump said at the end of the debate. While describing his foreign policy plans, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad: “he is a bad guy, very bad guy”.
The strategy seems to be working, though. ”Some part of the population associates simplicity in rhetoric to honesty," said Matthew Baum, a communications professor at Harvard University. Peter Lawler, a political science professor at Berry College said the short sentences and words appealed to people’s “elementary political instincts.”
Trump leads the pack of Republican presidential candidates with 39% of the vote share. His closest competitor, Ted Cruz is at 18%.
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